You can look at up to 2.8MHz of spectrum in real time and decode signals from it, not like most SDR receivers with only a hundred KHz or less bandwidth.

They are very cheap too, available from various places including ebay and cosycave where i got mine.

They have limitations with dynamic range (poor weak signal performance when close to strong signals) but add a little filtering and you will manage just fine.
I have used mine for EME on 1296MHz with great results as long as i have enough gain to lift the noise floor a fair amount then it is just as sensitive as my main radio.

There are a few variants of tuners:
E4000 coverage is 52MHz to 2GHz roughly
R820 coverage is 24MHz to 1.5GHz roughly

Myself i prefer the E4000 tuner variant for most uses as i find there are less spurs and less local pickup from the pc it is running on.